WHITE HOUSE: Yes, The US Is 'At War' With ISIS

U.S. President Barack
Obama delivers a live televised address to the nation on his
plans for military action against the Islamic State, from the
Cross Hall of the White House in Washington September 10,
2014.Saul
Loeb/Reuters

In a change of tune from the Obama administration, White House
press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday the U.S. is "at war"
with the group calling itself the Islamic State (also known as
ISIS or ISIL).

"The United States is at war
with ISIL in the same way we are at war with al Qaeda and its
affiliates," Earnest told reporters at the White
House.

Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm.
John Kirby echoed Earnest's statement on Friday, saying "we know
we are at war with ISIL" despite rejecting comparisons to
previous U.S.-led wars in Iraq.

The administration has
previously rejected such a characterization — "war" — preferring
to call a ramped-up campaign against the extremist Islamic group
some version of a "counterterrorism operation." As far back as
Aug. 29, Earnest rejected the characterization the
U.S. was "at war" with the group.

During a statement from the
White House on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama called his
plan for ramped-up action against the group a "counterterrorism
strategy." Secretary of State John Kerry refused to call the
campaign a "war" in an interview with CNN Thursday, saying the
"significant counterterrorism operation" will require "many
different things that one doesn't think of normally in context of
war."

"What we are doing is engaging
in a very significant counterterrorism operation," Kerry told
CNN's Elise Labott in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "It's going to go on
for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as
being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it's a
major counterterrorism operation that will have many different
moving parts."

Only Congress can declare war
under the U.S. Constitution. The Obama administration has in the
past few days cited the 2001 congressional authorization of
military force that came in the wake of the post-Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks as justification, a position with which some
legal scholars have disagreed. Obama told congressional leaders earlier this week
that he has the authority he needs to carry out his current
mission against ISIS.

In his primetime speech, Obama
cast his strategy in the same light as counterterrorism
operations in Yemen and Somalia.

But his comparison was rejected
by many analysts — including NBC's Richard Engel, who called it an "oversimplification" and "wildly off
base." The U.S. runs smaller, targeted counterterrorism
operations in both Yemen and Somalia, but they have the support
of cooperative governments.

"It's much more akin to regime
change than it is to wading back and picking targets with allied
forces," Engel said of the mission against ISIS. "They are not
comparable at all."